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Access Grid Toolkit 3.0 beta 1

Posted February 3rd, 2006 by sugree

The Access Grid Team at Argonne National Laboratory/University of Chicago has just announced the next step of Access Grid on January 28, 2006. In other word, Access Grid Toolkit 3.0 beta 1 is available for testing now.

This beta release is the first look at AG3 functionality. This is not a final release, and so is not considered stable. Install it if you’re willing to test and report problems. The more testing we get now, the better the final release will be!

As I have ever thought, AG3 doesn’t rely on Globus or GSI anymore. For more detail, Globus is replaced by SSL and GSI-HTTP file transfer is replaced by FTPS. That means AG3 is absolutely incompatible with the current AG2 implementation. In addition, there is no compatibility plan by now because they are so different.

Why AG3? AG2 is usable but not as good as expectation especially its user interface and slowness. However, incompatibility is the biggest issue even to test for lots of users including me. Fortunately, it offers very attractive features as follows.

  • Integrated Jabber client (It should be possible to chat with ).
  • Integrated meeting schedule viewer
  • Tree-based venues navigation
  • Certificate not required on client side
  • Integrated beacon matrix
  • New bridge
  • WDM capture device support

The most exciting feature for me is the last one. Most recent capture devices only provides WDM style device drivers so one machine can utilize only one device of VfW mapping to a WDM device at the same time.

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Grid applications...

On March 30th, 2007 larry says:
Hello Sugree, It's been awhile since I posted, but university has been busy. An area I've been working in lately has been one you like very much...grid computing. I have been wondering how difficult it would be to commercialize grid applications and make it more mainstream. I have read all your grid posts on this site and have seen a few examples either from big vendors or some highly specialized batch-submission type stuff. While this is all good, IMO it will not help make grid applications mainstream. So, I went looking around to see what I could find. For middleware, I found Condor, Globus, Legion, GridBus, and Unicore...to name a few of the more popular and stable projects. The problem with these projects, as they pertain to the web, is that they merely hook existing computers together and then create all the cool stuff grid computing can do. In other words, if you don't have 1000 extra PCs lying around to link together or a cray supercomputer at your disposal, these systems won't do much for you. So, I looked at Desktop Grid computing solutions. The most famous being Seti@Home and all the other projects using the same software. Seti@Home runs the BOINC platform, which is great because this software is more web oriented. It's a client-server structure that has millions of clients running on the PCs of those who wish to participate in the project. This is very different from the grid middleware I discussed earlier because you don't need to have 1000 extra PCs or a cray supercomputer lying around to make a grid. The users themselves, who install the grid client, create the grid to provide functionality to the system. BOINC is open source which is good. It is near impossible to configure for a commercial application, which is bad. I've looked at XtremGrid, but it appears a bit outdated. However, with it you can create a pseudo p2p network on your grid. A hybrid, which is cool. Do you know of any other, application-building-friendly, open source grid systems that can be used as a starting point for building grid apps on the web? Something I may have missed here? cheers, larry
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